Where the heck are we, anyway??

See our little vacation town -- Hamilton -- smack in the middle of the Bitterroot River Valley, with Idaho just over mountains that start at the end of our street?

This is another, harder-to-read map of the entire state, with Hamilton far to the west, on State Highway 93 and just above the words "Bitterroot Valley."

Several folks have asked me for a map of this ridiculously long but, now, very satisfying trip. It's overcast in Hamilton today, humidity at 75 percent with a little light rain, but the temp at 3 p.m. is just 50! It's lowest low this week is to be 41 degrees on Thursday night. Townsfolk are tired of this; they can't get their tomato plants in; and their fleece and down jackets are getting old. At the worst is flooding that's predicted on some farmland and county roads along the Bitterroot River, and even in parts of big-city Missoula and small-town Darby. The Ravalli Republic newspaper is keeping tabs:
http://ravallirepublic.com/news/local/article_4127be56-9178-11e0-b54f-001cc4c03286.html.

But I have to say that, as I think of the scorching temperatures in most of the rest of the country, I am so grateful to be spending some cool time here. The coffee shop, River Rising, must be grateful, too.  It is buzzing this afternoon; every table is filled, talk is cacophonous and the hot coffee's flowing as if this were Little Seattle.

Alex and I had a laugh the other day when a weekend "heat wave" of 80s during the day prompted our wonderful landlady to ask if we wanted the portable air-conditioner installed.  We thanked her and said "no." She's provided every other comfort possible in our tiny space. She's at http://www.vrbo.com/275459 (Vacation Rentals By Owners). I hesitate to post it only because I want access to it next year, that is, if Alex doesn't buy some little fixer-upper of a house here on the sly! (He'd better not!!)

Here are a few pictures I've taken of our small, shabby-chic rental space (some are duplicates, sorry):

We leave our digs tomorrow, weather and rivers permitting. We hope to venture east across the valley to the smaller, smoky-blue Sapphire Mountains for a wildlife walk with new binoculars from REI in Missoula (that MT store actually took our old, partly broken ones originally from REI in St. Louis as a trade!).  Life is good.

Back to the Garden

The West is greener than I've ever seen it!  For months, unusual amounts of rain and snow have pelted sagebrush and gardens alike. And this means that the high plains and foothills -- often tan or outright brown -- are verdant. Craggy mountain tops still have big snow pack.  And down below, places like Hamilton and its weekly farmers' market are full of spring and early-summer flowers. One farmers' market vendor sells her cut blossoms in small vases. I ask her about the array, and she laughs and says, "You should see the bald spot in my yard!"

Also at the market is a huge crop of shoppers (http://www.hamiltonfarmersmarket.webs.com/, see the photo gallery) out in sun to visit with each other after a long, wet winter.  They may rest in a set of blue chairs set out for live music...

...or eat a tasty breakfast of burritos from a Taqueria (the food truck trend reaches Hamilton!!)...

And besides other wares, such as local honey, spring greens and anything made with fresh rhubarb, there is a collection of eclectic, Western-motif birdhouses not to be missed!

But back to the garden. Lilac bushes are everywhere in Hamilton and in full bloom!...

Montana State University Extension writes about homesteaders bringing lilacs to the valley and finding that they're one of the few exotic shrub types to survive harsh winters here. Boy, do they ever!!

(msuextension.org/publications/YardandGarden/MT199805AG.pdf)

They decorate street corners, stand alone as specimens in front yards or make thick privacy screens between house and street, or house and neighbors. Even last night in Missoula -- on a trip to shop, eat out and, later, listen to Alex practice flute with other musicians he'd met online -- I sit just outside the screen door, on a lawn chair, and delight to the scent of lilacs in the yard. And, of course, to the six flutes inside.

My own temporary outdoor space back in Hamilton is lilac-free, unfortunately. But that doesn't mean there aren't cut stems of lilac in the house -- there to greet us when we arrive.  And dinner at the Grange the other night features lots and lots of lilac centerpieces, perhaps to soften and sweeten the politically charged atmosphere (?).

In any event, our little garden just outside the cottage door is about to burst into bloom with daisies and peonies. Flowers of iris, hardy geranium and gorgeous purple lupine spikes (see below) already are getting underway.

And my part in this bit of horticulture? (otherwise done quite beautifully by cottage owner Kris Komar!)  I can't help myself. Before a little dinner party here, I fill out the edge of a whiskey-barrel  with $4 worth of hardware-store pansies (yes, exactly the same kind of pansies that I'd just torn out of my St. Louis garden in advance of wilting summer heat; in Hamilton, they should last through June).  

And under those pansies? A little more guerilla gardening: I buy Botanical Interests cherry-red nasturtium seeds at the beautiful little Sam's Spade garden center, tool supply and gift shop in Hamilton. I will push the pea-sized seeds down under the pansies. With any luck, they'll produce leaves on stems before we leave at the end of June...

...and red flowers (for a red-white-and-blue theme that's happening here) for the next round of guests!!

A River Runs Through It

We hike the Kootenai Creek Trail a few miles north of Hamilton. It is so fast, cold and high that it thunders past and makes conversation nearly impossible. But it may be the most beautiful river I've ever seen!

Trail beside Kootenai ranges from a flat terrain of soft dirt and pine needles (easy) to steep, narrow and rocky slopes. We like the pace on level dirt, of course, but our knees seem to be holding out well on climbs and descents. We do four miles here and plan to come back for more.

Alex drops a line in here and there and gets not a nibble.  June 15 typically is when fly-fishing starts here. But the water's so cold and fast that the season may be pushed back toward the end of June.

  Every turn in the trail opens new views, large and small...

Alberta Penstemon

Including an array of wildflowers that I'm still working to identify...

Oregon Grape

Serviceberry

Alpine Paintbrush

 

And rocks at the end of the trail echo the color of Alpine Paintbrush, the one wildflower we're sure that we know!

Trouble in Paradise?

Do bad things really come in threes?

First: Ouch -- it’s a heat wave in Hamilton!! Well, sort of. The temperature at 1:30 p.m. is 71 degrees, going up to a "blistering" 84 as the predicted high. A girl behind the U.S. Forest Service desk (http://www.fs.usda.gov/bitterroot/) on Friday warns us that “this weekend is going to be hot!” How hot, we ask? “It’s getting up to 80!” she says. “That’s not hot,” corrects Alex -- who's from St. Louis (97 highs this week) via New Orleans (90s, also). And she laughs. Tonight's low? A lovely 45. And daytime temps for next week are to be in the 70s, then 60s, plus a little rain. Just right for me.

But today, iced coffee and frozen drinks are selling out at River Rising, the café and coffee bar. We walk there and then around the quiet streets on a Sunday afternoon and see folks out gardening and lots of cute little cottages cooling off under huge old oaks or conifers, always with a backdrop of the Bitterroot.

Things look prosperous, especially with employers such as the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton -- now a division of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (http://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/organization/dir/rml/Pages/default.aspx) and the early research institution on Rocky Mountain spotted tick fever. The lab is the reason Kelsey Milner Sr. came to do post-doctoral work in Hamilton in the ‘50s, and why his good friend and mentor, Morris Shaffer, brought his wife, Leah, and son, Alex (my Alex), out from New Orleans many summers in a row.

But I'm told later, at a dinner at the Grange, that the lab is small potatoes in terms of Hamilton's economic health. Lab workers are a small core of post-docs from all over the country.  I tell my dinner companion that we're renting a house, and she says, dryly, "You must've had a lot to choose from." She says "there are no jobs here" for low- and middle-income folks and that they're leaving to look elsewhere, with lots of houses for sale or for rent.  Well-off retirees (and Californians looking for summer homes) have discovered Hamilton and are pumping some money into it, but not enough. At least not according to my tablemate.

A sidebar to our walk -- we stop in at a fly fishing store and see just how dedicated Bitterroot familes are to the sport. Check out 11-year-old Matthew's fly-fishing flies for sale!

We also check in with Bob Ward Sporting Goods (http://www.bobwards.com/), a Montana hunting and fishing store that has items I've NEVER, ever seen before. Such as...

Second, in the trouble department: There's a big baby crow in the shrubs next to our wonderful patio. It's possibly injured, and its parents won't let up with the squawking! Understandably.

The fuss doesn't bother us but it does the next door neighbors. And so Alex -- biologist for "hire" -- goes on patrol, digs into the shrubbery, finally brings out the baby and takes it to a large conifer where the parents and a sibling have gathered (see a series of photos, below.) 

The odd thing is that the very next morning, we see no sign of baby crow or parents. A mystery! We hope all is well. We fear it is not.

Third, among Hamilton troubles is the influence and infiltration of the Tea Party.  A few new Ravalli County commissioners are ultra right wing and supporting, for instance, the extension of Hamilton airport runways to allow for noisy, wilderness-disturbing jets to fly in a few wealthy area residents. Hamilton has a population of about 5,000 and, over the years, has successfully campaigned to keep its Main Street businesses alive by keeping out the Wal-Marts of the world. For now, the right is a part of Hamilton life. The Ravalli County Fairgrounds even hosted such recent speakers as Red Beckman, a self-styled "anti-semitic tax protestor," and Schaeffer Cox, founder of the "Alaska Peacemakers Militia." A dinner that we attended at the Grange brought out a large number of progressives and a few Tea Partiers.  We were told by a Hamiltonian in the know that there may be as many as a third of the population leaning right, a third independent and a third progressive. We hope that we can make our voices heard on the left while we're here!!!

Welcome to Montana (we're here!)

 

But first, a bit about the route, to Montana from Sheridan, Wyo.  On the morning that we leave our little motel here, we come across the fantastically fronted Mint Bar on North Main Street.  A neon cowboy rides atop a small facade of vertical logs.  The time is a little after 10 a.m. and way too early for us to partake, but it looks like some Sheridan regulars are belly-up to the bar (scroll to the  bottom of http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/sheridan2.html).  They must be drinking coffee (?) and doing a bit of the town's business. The entire Main Street is bustling on this weekday morning.

Our route out of Wyoming takes us northwest, through the Big Horn mountains where snow dominates the scenery as we gain altitude.  Reports on individual basins, in fact, are for snow levels about 115% above normal this year. 

We're told by a ranger at the top of a pass that we can't take a scenic road just north of Yellowstone; it's closed due to avalanches. So, to get to Bozeman -- our stop for the night -- we go lower, through Greybull and Cody.  We eat Tex-Mex at Lisa's in Greybull (http://www.roadfood.com/Restaurant/Overview/3070/lisas) and just before we get to Cody, we turn off onto what we think is a "Scenic Byway" (http://www.byways.org/explore/states/MT/). It's not. It turns out to be a road into land owned by Friends Of A Legacy (FOAL) -- a group dedicated to protecting remaining wild mustang after a controversial round-up in 2005 by the Bureau of Land Management (http://www.wlt.org/wlt_collaborations_foal_project.asp). 

We don't see the horses. But we do meet two old gals outfitted with two-feet-long birdwatching cameras. "Did you see any horses?" they ask as they slow down their massive pickup. "No," we answer lamely. "We're just here looking for scenic roads." And, of course, everything around us is "Scenic" with a capital "S" -- spectacular vistas of red rock, sage brush and mountains as far as the eye can see. We wish each other luck and move on.

I do find abstract "art" in rocks and weathered wood. Below, I see it in the usually bone-dry high-plains  dirt, now-shiny and water-soaked at our feet. Rain and snow have been a constant here over winter and into spring.

Many back roads are under construction as we cross into Montana (bullet holes dot a sign, as often happens in this state)...

...and motor out Interstate 90 to Bozemen, and south a few miles to the Gallatin Gateway Inn. 

It's an old railway hotel -- the last stop for 19th Century folks journeying to Yellowstone -- and we relax, relax, relax in some civilized elegance. There's a fine, white-linen-tablecloth pub meal in the hotel's Porter House and a long night's sleep under cotton sheets of a high(?) thread count, with windows open and high-meadow birds chirping as we rise the following morning. We breakfast just off of the inn's vaulted lobby...

... and I make one last stop to a pristine, old, turn-of-the-century women's restroom, if only to snap a photo of what those long-skirted gals would've found after a long journey by train.

We drive west and southwest from Bozeman to cross the The Big Hole River and its surrounding meadows. The river is HIGH and threatening to flood the little town of Wisdom.  We cross it several times on our way to the Bitterroot Valley. Mountains are always on the horizon.

 

And we also drive by the sad and incredibly beautiful Big Hole National Battlefield (http://www.nps.gov/biho/index.htm), where the sleeping, peaceful Nez Perce Indians were slaughtered in 1877.  A visitors' center there is under construction and we decide to move on.

At the top of Lost Trail Pass, on the Montana and Idaho border, we venture into a welcome center and find a gas stove blazing -- there's several feet of snow outside -- and a sign, "We'll be back soon." We pick up folder after leaflet after map of information on both states, sign a guest book and thank whoever runs the place for their trust and generosity.

Some 2,065 miles later, we pull in to our destination for the month, Hamilton, Mt., about 40 miles south of Missoula (http://www.travelmt.com/mt-cities-Hamilton.html) and home to great coffee at the aptly named River Rising (http://www.riverrisingbakery.com/); great local beer at Bitter Root Brewery (http://www.bitterrootbrewing.com/); and funky new/old Montana postcards by Duckboy Cards (http://www.duckboy.com/). We find our little blue rental cottage. It's been raining off and on in Hamilton for weeks (they so want some sun!), but we find our nearly 100-year-old house and patio relatively dry and in great condition, surrounded by lush Lily of the Valley and verdant lawn. A big red patio umbrella, table, chairs and an American flag also greet us.

Bright orange California poppies wave at us from a garden across the street...

And once we're inside, we're completely charmed by the chic little cottage and its clean, if shabby-chic style.

We're here!!! And as soon as the rain lets up, we'll plan hikes and fly-fishing expeditions. For now, we cozy up in the cottage, or walk to get an espresso and wonder at the misty mountain scene...

... just at the end of our street!!